Friday, June 11, 2021

Friday, June 11, 2021

 

            Boy, do I miss Mike's hugs. Their impact on my stress was incomparable. Meditation helps but not as much. I don't meditate as much as I should, either.

            When I posted my blog from last year to the public site this morning, I saw Turkey was no longer on the list. I was down to seven visits yesterday. There must be some English teacher assigning the blog to his Turkish students. So weird.

    One of the 7-year-old twins I started working with has a memory problem. Her teachers and her mother have tried to teach her the letters of the alphabet without success. She couldn't remember the name of a letter from one minute to the next in the half-hour I worked with her. Her twin sister does much better. Her reading may be delayed, but she can name the letters rapidly. The focus has to switch from teaching information to teaching her how to remember. Below are the instructions I sent to her mother.

-Post A's name around the house.  

-In passing, several times a day, whenever possible, point to a letter and SAY the letter name. Have her repeat the letter name while tracing the letter with her finger. 

-You can do just one of the letters at a time. Don't think you have to do her full name every time. You can pick any letter. You are working on her memory, NOT letter identification. When she feels she can, she will volunteer to name a letter. Yes, perhaps just a single letter. 

-Always compliment her.

Don't compliment her on something she hasn't done.   

If she repeats the letters correctly, you compliment her on that. "You did a good job saying the letters after I did."

"You did a good job tracing the letter."

-The first time she volunteers a letter name on her own, break out the champagne. However, don't expect her to repeat that in the immediate future. Start again with you naming the letters and her repeating what you say. You can say, "Would you like to try it yourself?"  Don't push her if she says no. Leave that to me. Your disappointment will be devastating. a)I won't be as disappointed, and b) she won't care as much about my feelings.

-She is not "retarded." She was able to tell me that she has memory problems. No one who is retarded is capable of that degree of self-awareness. 

DO NOT PUSH HER. Let me do that. You only do supportive work. Everyone in the family can do it with her. If she refuses to cooperate with anyone, let me know.  

If she does it with you, but not her siblings, have them just model. "A, This is an O." and not require anything of her. 

HANDLE WITH GREAT CARE!

Remember, make four positive comments before you make one negative one. A good teacher does NOT correct every mistake. Knowing when to correct rather than praise is a teaching skill. 

 

On one of my short walks during the day, a neighbor passed me and stopped to talk. He sued one of our neighbors for having a dozen roosters on his property. He managed to force the guy to get rid of those birds. He tried to get the police involved, but that did nothing. People who breed roosters like that do it for cockfighting. While it's illegal to have cock fights, raising them for that purpose is not unlawful. While there are noise ordinances about people, there are none about animals waking us up in the middle of the night. The annoyed neighbor brought a civil suit against the guy. The man owning the cocks gave up because he feared the lawyer would have cost him a fortune, and he wasn't sure he could win. Now, the annoyed neighbor reported his wife wakes up at 4 am because she hears a rooster. He asked me to help him figure out where it was coming from. It may be a wild one. One of my nieces says I live in a nature preserve: wild chickens, wild turkeys, wild pheasants, wild goats, and wild pigs. All these animals were released when people moved away. There's a flock of wild peacocks in one of the neighborhoods.

            I missed my session with I. yesterday because she had other activities. We rescheduled for today. However, she couldn't hear me. My mute wasn't on; I didn't know what the problem was. I exited the Zoom session and sent another. That didn't work. I tried to go through a second computer. That didn't work. It finally dawned on me to tell her to check her sound setting. Her computer was on mute. I had fifteen minutes left before I had to leave for an appointment with my acupuncturist. I just canceled the class for the day.

            No sooner was I off the Zoom meeting with I, than I got a text from my acupuncturist. Could we cancel for the day? Her family dog had died that morning. It was the third dog to die over a short period of time. Judy and Howard had to put down their dog Beau; Yvette had to put down her dog, Izzy, and now this. It was what happened right before Mike died. I was hearing about people dying almost daily. I remembered feeling fear; how could death knock on so many doors and not mine? However, when Mike collapsed, I remained blissfully unaware that his likelihood of surviving was close to zero. Dorothy told me afterward she looked it up and realized how serious it was. 

    Jean, my hanai sister, and Mike's first wife, called. When I call her, it is often inconvenient. She's either working, eating, or napping. As two old people do, we exchanged information about our medical conditions. I'm in reasonably good health and have few complaints. My hip is an ongoing problem, but I am rarely in pain and often quite comfortable in my body. My big news is my plan to get Botox injected into my forehead to lift my brow. Kaiser is covering it because it is a medical necessity. My biggest problem is on my left side. My brow hangs over my eye, obscuring some of my vision. I hope they do both sides so I look somewhat normal. Fortunately, vanity is not one of my strong suits. If I look weird, I'll find it funny.

            I also told Jean about an interpersonal problem I was having. I didn't remember something the way this other person did; they immediately said they were concerned about my inability to remember it. It was something serious. My mom always did that to me. If I didn't remember something the way she did, she declared something wrong with me. I know I am more sensitive to this treatment than others, but I also know that I can't be around someone who responds that way to differences in perception or memory. I cannot go through this again.

            Judy was reading Hidden Valley Road about a family of twelve with six of the boys becoming schizophrenics. OMG! Judy found the book fascinating and wanted to discuss it with me. I got it on Kindle. I'm not finding it fascinating. Or maybe I'm just finding the tragedy too stressful.  

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            I'm back on writing about co-creation. Mike and I saw ourselves as working that way, ideally. In other words, it happened more times than it did not, but neither of us had reached a state of perfection.

            In the process of co-creation, arguments occur. However, the objective in arguing is as much to get the other person to convince you of their point of view as to impress them with our own. When I'm 'arguing," You might ask, well then, what are you yelling about? The answer: you want the other person to address your objections to your point of view.